Description:
Nepal is one of the countries hypothesized to have a strong preference for a son. The project investigates implications of son preference on the number of children per household and on economic decisions and outcomes such as poverty status. The study uses gender as a natural experiment and investigates direct effects on allocation of investments between education, dowry, and physical capital as well as indirect effects such as the number of children. It also investigates how these decisions ultimately affect labor market participation and poverty. The results do not show any causal effect of number of children on overall economic outcomes. However independent of the number of children, there is a positive effect on boys’ education when the first-born is a daughter because she presumably takes care of household chores, which enables the sons to focus on school. Therefore, the gender of the first two children has implications for the economic status of the household. Future policy implications may encourage a woman to receive more education in order to delay childbearing, and therefore to decrease the number of children that she has to immediately influence poverty rates.